The Conservative Movement to Get a New York Times Reporter Fired

A right-wing attempt to harass a woman of color out of a job at The New York Times appears to have fizzled — for now.

The Times announced Wednesday that it had hired Sarah Jeong to its editorial board. Jeong’s qualifications are numerous: She is an expert in technology and legal issues, having written for The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, and more; she is currently a senior writer at The Verge; she is a lawyer and former editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender.

She is also, unsurprisingly, the target of frequent harassment on Twitter. “If I saw you. I would sock you right in your lesbian face,” wrote one Twitter user. (In 2014, Jeong tweeted, "Men who think I'd be upset about being misidentified as lesbian smh.") “Shut the fuck up you dog eating g**k,” wrote another.

As a platform, Twitter has proven to be a fertile ground for such abuse, leaving targets with little recourse. And so for a time, Jeong said, she responded with “counter-trolling” that was intended as satire.

“#CancelWhitePeople,” she tweeted in 2014. “I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play ‘Things white people can definitely take credit for,’ it’s really hard,” she wrote in 2015. In 2013, she wrote that she didn’t like Battlestar Galactica because it’s just “white people being miserable” and that “it must be so boring to be white.”

These interactions and others from several years ago went relatively unnoticed, until The Times announced Jeong’s hiring Wednesday. Predictably, right-wing trolls began scouring her social media history for anything that could fuel a performance of outrage.

A Twitter user going by @GarbageHuman_ compiled a handful of Jeong’s tweets in an image, and they began circulating through right-wing accounts. “Racist tweets surface,” wrote a Fox website. “A history of anti-white racist tweets,” wrote The Daily Caller. Various right-wing observers joined in a show of outrage, insisting that The New York Times was complicit in racist rhetoric by hiring Jeong.

Another Twitter user re-created Jeong’s tweets, replacing “white” with “black” — as though the marginalization of people of color is in any way comparable to the privilege experienced by white people.

Displays of right-wing pearl-clutching have become more than just a well-established pattern; they are also, increasingly, wielded as a weapon. A similar campaign was launched against James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, after he was vocally critical of Donald Trump. A game company fired writer Jessica Price after Twitter users complained that she was insufficiently deferential to them.

A handful of onlookers tried to connect Jeong’s tweets to the rhetoric of Kevin Williamson, who said that he believed women who get abortions should be hanged. The Atlantic fired Williamson just weeks after hiring him. Of course, there’s a wide gulf between a joke about Battlestar Galactica and a statement that seriously advocates for the killing of women.

Not all employers are willing to back down in the face of right-wing outrage drama. Following the outcry about Jeong, The Verge issued a statement standing by their writer, calling the backlash “dishonest.”

“Online trolls and harassers want us, The Times, and other newsrooms to waste our time by debating their malicious agenda,” wrote The Verge. “This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation.”

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For its part, The New York Times is standing its ground. “We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done,” the company’s PR department said in a statement, adding that of her years-old tweets, “she regrets it, and The Times does not condone it. … She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times.”

In other words, conservative America can rest easy: The New York Times editorial board does not actually believe that white people need to be “cancelled” — whatever that could even mean.

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